Alchera
Turning Ai Dreams Into Reality

From smart home devices like Alexa to smart vision solutions utilized on production lines, technology powered by AI and ML models has become ubiquitous across personal and business settings. And as the technology revolution continues to take over the modern world with new and emerging applications, businesses across sectors are trying to unlock more opportunities with their AI-based offerings. In light of this, the current AI technology arena is a highly competitive space brimming with innovative solutions that are purpose-built to meet every business need. A prime example of AI’s widespread adoption in a marketplace is the image recognition sector, which comprises a multitude of smart cameras designed with comprehensive functionalities including visual detection of anomalies in products, facial recognition, and risk prediction, among others. None, however, has expanded the horizons of AI in smart cameras more than South Korea-based Alchera.

Since its inception in 2016, the company has empowered multinational businesses in a plethora of arenas by leveraging its team expertise in computer vision, deep learning, augmented reality (AR), graphics, data science, and software engineering. Currently, the company offers a SaaS-based integrated solution, AIIR, which stands for ‘Artificial Intelligence Image Recognition’ and uses Alchera’s powerful AI technology to help businesses apply facial recognition to improve their operational efficiencies.

The Three Pillars to Success

Alchera is built around three core values: cooperation, transparency, and simplicity, which the company effectively delivers on with its impeccable customer relations and proven track record of success across multiple industries. Above all, Alchera’s mission is to bring AI to the fore and leverage its power to create a world where AI technologies improve our daily lives. “We try to create a better society and a more convenient world by turning all cameras into ‘smart’ devices with our AI technology,” says Young-Kyoo Hwang, CEO of Alchera. Another core facet in Alchera’s success is its team’s ability to diligently work towards innovating AI applications that have been deemed far too complicated to realize. In fact, within its short enterprise journey of four years, the company acquired a listing on KOSDAQ with its continual advancements into developing AI technology that can be used by people of all ages.

Unlocking Smarter AI Applications

Alchera’s AIIR solution is powered by its unique visual AI that is built to capture every expression, every state, and every moment of everything to enhance consumer convenience.

The company’s visual AI powers AIIR’s ability to identify people through facial recognition, which can be used for access control, workforce management, and student attendance. At the same time, AIIR can detect fires through smoke with high accuracy, thereby making it a critical prevention avenue for wildfires and accidental indoor fires.

Apart from the AIIR solution, the company has also developed AR technology that analyzes and implements 3D movement using a simple 2D camera. Alchera offers this technology through its Alchera Unity Model at Github, which drives an easy experience of building multi-platform Face & Hand AR applications that are supported on iOS, Android, Windows and macOS. The company also offers documentation and sample codes to speed up the rate of app development. In fact, Alchera has the leading AR technology in Asia, which it offers to consumers through its SNOW app.

Alternatively, Alchera also offers its Face SDK and API to drive its clients to build their own facial recognition systems powered by the company’s world-class AI. The toolkit comprises an extensive service offering that ranges from collecting high-quality data in-house and training the AI to interface development. Alchera SDK and API are built to help developers take that one final step in the creation of their own facial recognition software. Furthermore, the company offers high-quality datasets to help its clients train their visual AI models with computer vision expert-backed insights. Alchera’s toolkit is proven to be the fastest—with a lightning speed of 0.01s for facial detection—and accurate—over 99.9 percent recognition accuracy—at facial detection.

Leveraging AI to Protect the World

With the unmatched competencies of its portfolio, Alchera has ignited several success stories over the years. In 2021, the company was chosen by Sonoma County, CA to develop smart camera-based visual detection systems that can identify early signs of wildfires. After a series of destructive wildfires blazed through Northern California in October 2017, the community alert and warning offices of the county have been seeking an avenue to help prevent such destruction in the future. Alchera was perfectly poised for this project as it had already deployed a large-scale fire detection system at Korea’s largest electric utility firm—KEPCO. From then, Alchera has been processing millions of images—detecting hundreds of early-stage wildfire ignitions from ALERT Wildfire cameras since June of 2019 through various proofs of concepts and trials. “With our cutting-edge AI-based wildfire detection system, we are able to help reduce the damage of forest fires in California, which, as we have seen, suffers greatly from this phenomenon every year,” explains Young-Kyoo.

Rewind to 12 months ago, the company was playing a critical role in helping create the model image of South Korea as a nation perfectly handling the business disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. With its AIIR solution’s ability to offer effective access control, Alchera helped South Korean businesses safely transition to a contactless business operation and promoting a safe and convenient society in the public and the private security sectors. “The effective isolation and prevention of COVID-19 in South Korea drew the global attention on the advancement of bio and ICT technologies, and that facial recognition technology is considered as the core technology in the era of the contactless society,” states Young-Kyoo.

A Future of Endless Possibility

Looking ahead, Alchera is perfectly poised to continue innovating the realm of AI-powered image recognition and unlock newer opportunities that will drive the creation of a convenient human experience. To conclude, Young-Kyoo reiterates the ethos of Alchera, “We are taking one step at a time with the goal of collaboration, transparent information disclosure, and simple technology supply to realize your AI dreams with you.”